Current conservation status and potential distribution under climate change of Michelia lacei, a Plant Species with Extremely Small Populations in Yunnan, China
YANG L IU † 1 , 2 ,LEI CAI † 1 andWEI B A N G SUN* 1
Abstract Michelia laceiW.W. Smith, amagnolia species ca- tegorized as Endangered on the IUCN Red List, is subject to severe disturbance.Wecarried out field surveys and a review of literature records to present a detailed description of the current status of M. lacei. We then predicted the potential distribution of M. lacei under different climatic scenarios based on 60 occurrence records (53 recorded during our field surveys and 7 earlier records) and 19 bioclimatic vari- ables from the WorldClim database. We selected 18 loca- tions and four bioclimatic variables for model training. Temperature seasonality and annual temperature range were the most influential variables for predicting the poten- tial distribution of the species. We used MaxEnt to model distribution under current climate conditions and four Shared Socioeconomic Pathway scenarios in four future time periods to determine the effects of future climate change on the habitat suitable for the species. We predict areas of moderately and highly suitable habitat will gradual- ly decrease over time. We recommend increased in situ and ex situ conservation efforts to mitigate this habitat decline and protect populations of M. lacei.
Keywords China, climate change, conservation status, ex situ conservation, MaxEnt, maximum entropy model, Michelia lacei, Plant Species with Extremely Small Populations
The supplementary material for this article is available at
doi.org/10.1017/S0030605323001783
Introduction G
lobal climate change is one of the greatest challenges (Bellard et al., 2012; Franchini & Mannucci, 2015;
Malhi et al., 2020). The annual growth rate of global green- house gas emissions during 2010–2019 was lower than that
†Contributed equally
*Corresponding author:
wbsun@mail.kib.ac.cn 1Yunnan Key Laboratory for Integrative Conservation of Plant Species with Extremely Small Populations, and Key Laboratory for Plant Diversity and Biogeography of East Asia, Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of
Sciences, Kunming, Yunnan, China 2University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
Received 27 May 2023. Revision requested 7 September 2023. Accepted 13 November 2023. First published online 4 November 2024.
during 2000–2009, but overall global carbon emissions are still increasing (IPCC, 2022). If current trends continue, we will face significant climatic, environmental and social risks (Fischer et al., 2013). Climate change affects the survival and distribution of species (Jiang, 2013; Mkala et al., 2022). Changes in global climate can cause the displacement or loss of suitable habitats for some threatened species, leading to a decrease in population numbers and the extinction of species (Cai et al., 2022; Iseli et al., 2023). Potential distribution areas of species under different
scenarios can be predicted using species distribution models (Klanderud & Birks, 2003; Qin et al., 2020; Cai et al., 2022). The most common models include the bioclimatic analysis and prediction system model (BIOCLIM; Busby, 1991), the maximum entropy model (MaxEnt; Phillips et al., 2006), the generalized linear model (Guisan et al., 2002), the genetic algorithm for rule-set prediction model (GARP; Sanchez-Flores, 2007) and the DOMAIN model (Carpenter et al., 1993). Although such models can produce species distribution maps, they are limited by the quality of data and so should be accompanied by field surveys to increase the accuracy of predictions (Abdelaal et al., 2019; Mkala et al., 2022). Compared to other species distribution models, MaxEnt
is considered to have a relatively high predictive accuracy for species with small sample sizes, small geographical ranges and limited environmental tolerance (Phillips & Dudik, 2008), and has been widely used to predict the ranges of rare and threatened species with few distribution data and narrow distributions (Hernandez et al., 2006; Liu et al., 2022). Predicting the potential distributions of threatened species can help scientists and policymakers understand the effects of environmental change on species survival and can inform the planning of appropriate strategies to re- duce the risk of extinction (Lawler et al., 2009; Kamilar & Beaudrot, 2013). Michelia lacei W.W. Smith is an evergreen tree in the
Magnoliaceae family, categorized as a Plant Species with Extremely Small Populations because of its narrow distribu- tion, small number of individuals, the continuing impact of anthropogenic disturbance across its habitat and its high risk of extinction (Sun et al., 2019a, 2019b). The species was categorized as Critically Endangered on the China Species Red List in 2004 (Wang & Xie, 2004), but was reca- tegorized as Endangered in 2015 following additional field
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited. Oryx, 2024, 58(5), 631–640 © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605323001783
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